I don’t know whether to be thrilled that civility is finally grabbing headlines across the country or not. It is in the headlines because recently it seems to be in short supply – in government, in sports, and in entertainment. No doubt most of us can think of incidents closer to home where we have experienced a bit of incivility ourselves.
While I bemoan a general loss of civility in our society, I am at least thankful that we are noticing that it is slipping away. As they say, recognizing a problem is the first step to solving it. I just hope that the people of this country have the desire and resolve to start intentionally reclaiming civility – in our homes, schools, businesses, faith communities, civic groups and government – before it slips even further away. And I hope we will encourage others to do the same.
About Google,
I have a Question….. I have noticed that when I do a Google search on my machine at home that the results tend to be fairly relevant to me.
When doing the same search on my Mother’s machine this is not the case, which I am assuming is because her “Cookie” and search history are different than mine.
The search results seem to be more relevant to her, which I also assume is the goal, Tailored Search results. If this indeed the case, is this type of search algorithm used across the board? I ask this because I noticed a disturbing trend. When I search on political issues most if not all of the results are of the Left leaning type which I admit are relevant to me. Doing the same search on my mothers machine the results are mostly of the far right bent and are relevant to her. These types of results while great for durable goods and services seem detrimental to the public in search of balanced discourse. My mother ( “Who is not at all computer literate” ) thinks that the search results are the totality of what’s on the Net and I am sure that there are a great many people just like her. There seems to be some sort of positive reinforcement loop thing going on where ” I’ll only tell you, what you want to hear. “. When so many people today use Google as their primary way to gather News I just wonder if the ” I’ll only tell you, what you want to hear. ” type of results is “aiding and abetting” the divisions in our country.
Quorumforum * “Some Assembly Required”
September 30th, 2009, at 8:45 pm #Cassandra, I’ve been thinking the same thing about the recent spate of attention to civility in the media. My concern is that, between the 24×7 news cycle and our short national attention span, the lack of civility will be “yesterday’s news” before we know it. I wonder how we might turn the headlines into a groundswell to fix the problem.
October 20th, 2009, at 6:04 pm #